Posts Tagged ‘bungie’

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Before vanishing up its own Halo for the best part of a decade, Bungie tried its hand at real-time strategy. The first two games in the Myth [official site] series are splendid creations, with an almost unmatched atmosphere of war-weary exhaustion and dread. There are also superb dwarves armed with explosives that send body parts bouncing across the terrain.

Halo may be cock of the walk on Xbox but though the first two games were ported to PC, the series never really took off round our way. The ports were wonky and, well, the idea of an enjoyable first-person shooter was less of a novelty on PC. Still, the first Halo has spawned a small but devoted fanbase on PC who were less than thrilled that its online multiplayer was facing the chop in the GameSpy server shutdown. Third-party tool GameRanger stepped in with a stopgap, but now creators Bungie have released an official patch ditching GameSpy.

It seems someone at Bungie was itching for an excuse to patch Halo, as that’s not all it changes.

Everyone, buckle up. It’s time to feel old. Here’s some history for you: Halo: Combat Evolved for PC has been up and running for nearly 11 years. Also, I had totally forgotten that it was handled by none other than Borderlands creator Gearbox back when they almost exclusively developed ports of games like Half-Life and, er, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. THESE ARE ALL TRUTHS, incontrovertible building blocks of the life you snooze your way through, blissfully unaware. Halo, however, was all set to get a halo of its own, courtesy of GameSpy’s impending closure. Fortunately, an Australia-based service called GameRanger has stepped in to save its online multiplayer at the last second.

It’s kind of a fantastic time to be a PC gamer, if you haven’t noticed. Pretty much everything of note is coming to our platform of choice, and also we get productivity software! Does it get any better? That does, however, make rare exceptions like Halo creator Bungie’s new (don’t-call-it-an) MMOFPS Destiny all the stranger. So why can’t the multi-million-dollar-banking mega-dev – dual-wielding newfound pseudo-freedom and a series not synonymous with Microsoft’s bawkes of eckses – pump out a PC version? “It’s complicated,” apparently. But there is hope, dim though it might be, for the future.

Bungie’s ambitious-sounding “sandbox” MMOFPS, Destiny, might not miss out on the One True Format after all, according to words spoken by writer and head of community Eric Osborne. In an interview with IGN he said:

“We haven’t said yes, and we haven’t said no… The more platforms we take on, the more work it ultimately becomes, and what we don’t want is to compromise the core experience on any platforms. We have a lot of people who play on PCs. We have a lot of appetite to build that experience. We haven’t announced it yet, but we’re looking forward to talking more about that kind of stuff in the future.”

Those remarks seemingly made by Bungie yesterday, that no one plays FPS games with a mouse and keyboard any more, have led to some pretty silly debate. But it’s hard to get more peculiar than an article that recently appeared on Ars Technica. Titled, “Sorry to say it, but keyboard and mouse are losing the FPS market”, it not only rather helpfully highlights all the most common misconceptions about the PC’s place in the market, but rather brilliantly provides some compelling data to show just how significant a player the PC actually is. Let’s take a look.

Halo creators Bungie have announced the platforms for their next game, online shooter Destiny, and PC is not amongst them. With 360 and PS3 versions certain, and next-gen consoles hinted at, it would seem to make a certain degree of sense to release the game on the format most suited to online FPS. But no, because according to Bungie, of mouse and keyboard players, “Nobody plays shooters the way they used to… ’cause nobody wants to.”

The PC version of the original Halo was actually pretty strong, all things considered. Fun fact: it was the first Halo game anywhere to have official online multiplayer. Halo 2, however, didn’t manage such a sterling performance. Mainly, it was meant to be Windows Vista’s killer app, and Vista – at least, at launch – just let people with a desire to kill. As a result of that exclusivity, Master Chief’s Covenant-bomb-giving-back-est adventure went largely ignored and was left to the ravages of time – which brings us to today. According to Microsoft, it’s now got 20 players. Yes, 20 – concurrently, at least. Unsurprisingly, they’ve declared it time to pull the plug.

Could we really be seeing the slow, painful and long-overdue rebirth of the MMOFPS in 2011? A panel at GDC suggest that we might be, as Bungie lead network engineer David Aldridge said that their MMO was an action game and also not “WoW In Space.” It’s the first firm evidence of the rumoured MMO title, and the idea that it could be a mature action game too is rather exciting. (Via IGN.)

With Planetside Next, Firefall, and others arriving this year, and the Bungie MMO and others starting to form in the years beyond, we might just start to get the massive shooter horizon we were promised in 2003. (Also, we should have a rather juicy story next week, which is relevant to this line of speculation. Stay tuned!)

A slide from a recent financial conference revealed Activision’s big prospects for the coming years, and it heavily implicates the PC. We know there’s another Blizzard MMO on the way, of course, but there’s also Bungie, who Microsoft relied on to prop up the Xbox with exclusive titles over the past few years. There seems little doubt that Activision will be wanting a similar blockbuster from the studio, only this time Activision know – thanks to the money-printing monster that is Call of Duty – that they might as well bring it out on all platforms. Whether or not you give a damn about Halo, it’s worth remembering how ambitious the game looked when it was still a PC title. If Bungie still have those kinds of aspirations in them, things could get really interesting. This could be the biggest announcement in quite some time, when it happens. Any bets on it being the big reveal for E3 next year?

Well, 10 years, which is BFF! in corporate terms. News broke of this yesterday, with the aforementioned 10-year publication agreement to bring Bungie’s next game universe to market. Bungie will keep intellectual property rights and remain independent. Obviously, this is enormous industry news, and there’s no real details yet – I wouldn’t be surprised to see some at E3 – but this is relevant for one key reason. This is a multi-format deal. And something which hasn’t been mentioned explicitly yet… well, the PC (and the Mac, for that matter, given Bungie’s roots) are other formats. It’d be good to have Bungie back with us. Question, is what are they doing? What would you like them to do? The MMO angle is brought up repeatedly, certainly. Personally, I’d be a little disappointed if they split from Microsoft just to make another Sci-fi universe…

How’s about this for after-sales support. Gearbox have just patched Halo: Combat Evolved. Yes, the first one. The 1.08 patch for the five year old game removes the need for a CD to be in the drive when you play (a tacit nod to freedom?) and fixes some bugs for online play.

Shack spotted the fix added to their own Fileshack, which will become required for online play from tomorrow. Anyone out there still playing?

The existence of a Halo MMO is an ongoing rumour, but how likely is it?

It’s a safe bet that if anyone was going to be able to pull off a successful MMOFPS, it would be Bungie and Microsoft with a version of Halo. Of course it might just be on 360, but why wouldn’t MS try to tap into the Blizzard millions with a cross-platform version? This is more than wishful thinking: the clues are out there. No, they really are.Read the rest of this entry »